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Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 (2002) 549-550



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The First Quarto of Othello. Edited by Scott McMillin. The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 148. $50.00 cloth.

John Hazel Smith, editor of the New Variorum edition of Othello until his death in 1986, contended that an authoritative edition should present the Quarto of 1622 and the First Folio arranged on facing pages so that the myriad differences between the two texts would be readily apparent. His contention seems particularly prescient now in light of Scott McMillin's edition of Othello's First Quarto for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. As McMillin notes in his fascinating introduction, the discrepancies between these two texts, printed only a year apart, include not just the omission of 160 Folio lines from the Quarto but"thousands of points" (1), including stage directions, punctuation, lineation, and, in many cases, the selection of two different but perfectly good words in the same line to say the same thing. McMillin's mission, similar to W. W. Greg's and E.A.J. Honigmann's, is to understand the relationship of these two texts and to explain the reasons for the differences between them.

McMillin sets out his case point by point. W. W. Greg, he notes, originally identified the copy for Q1 as Shakespeare's foul papers, an early version of Shakespeare's design, expanded and revised in another manuscript, the copy for F. But, as McMillin painstakingly demonstrates, the New Bibliographers' binary between "foul papers" and "prompt copy" does not hold up. Manuscripts that fit neither category were produced in the bustling world of London's theaters for a variety of reasons; scripts to present to patrons and scripts for court revivals are just two cases in point. The operative word here is script, for clearly Shakespeare's words were subject to transformation by prompters, scribes, and, most importantly, actors.

McMillin shows that the majority of passages omitted from Q1 occur in the last two acts: "The author did not expand the Q1 version into the F version. Someone reduced the F version into the Q1 version, emphasizing cuts in the later acts, abridging the roles for the boy-actors" (10-11), perhaps for a court revival where a shorter version would be preferred, or perhaps because the actors playing Emilia and Desdemona were less capable. Q1, he concludes, was written out by a scribe who was recording the words that actors dictated to him from memory. This process would have been an economical way to attain an authorized copy for any number of purposes, including a court revival. Thus, McMillin arrives at a new theory of memorial reconstruction, in this case under the auspices of the playing company. [End Page 549]

To make his case, McMillin sets Othello Q1 within the context of other plays published from King's Company manuscripts soon after 1619. And while such comparisons may not revolutionize the editing of Shakespeare, McMillin is absolutely right to urge scholars to broaden their investigations of Shakespeare's texts by connecting them to other plays printed contemporaneously, not simply to each other.

The last section of the introduction turns to the somewhat shakier ground of punctuation. McMillin shows how the period is often withheld in Q1, inserted only at the end of a larger rhetorical unit when an actor driving a long speech to closure might finally pause. He conjectures that the withheld period, as well as Q1's frequent use of dashes, was the natural result of the scribe's attempts to capture the actor's speaking voice, a process of listening and writing hastily at the same time.

This edition follows the format for the New Cambridge Shakespeare's Early Quartos series by presenting Q1 in a modernized text. This policy strikes me as a poor choice for a series whose primary audience is bound to be scholars, many of whom would prefer to omit the thousands of miniscule but nevertheless necessary interpretive interventions required by modernization. The notes are geared to the textual scholar rather than the student and...

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